Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (76 page)

The device of repeating a simple motive parallels torch songs such as “In Buddy’s Eyes” and would occur in other obsessive situations in subsequent Sondheim shows, for example, when Seurat sings about “Finishing
the Hat.” Sally’s song expresses a defeatist attitude and a disconnection with reality, exemplified metaphorically by her inability to find a root or tonal center when she sings the oft-repeated “in Buddy’s eyes” in her first song and her descending melodic phrase that matches “I think about you” in her second song. In bold contrast, Carlotta’s mantra, a major triad invariably ends each time in ascending and affirmative melodic triumph on its fifth, like a bugle call.
Sweeney Todd
may be about obsession, but compared with Sally and later George in
Sunday in the Park with George
, Sweeney’s
musical
obsessions are relatively tame.

Two songs were added to
Follies
late in the process. The first was Phyllis’s folly number, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” a song that replaced “Uptown, Downtown”; the second was Ben’s folly song, “Live, Love, Laugh.” Both were apparently composed and staged during a frenetic final week of rehearsals. In their published remarks Sondheim and Bennett disagree about why “Uptown, Downtown” was discarded. Sondheim remembers that he wrote it after he had worked out Ben’s breakdown number and gave it to Bennett one day before the Boston tryouts. Sondheim also recalls that Bennett resented being rushed, “turned against it,” and asked for a new number: “I don’t think there’s really any difference between the numbers, but because he had more time to think about it, I think he liked it better.”
⁷⁹
Bennett recalled the situation somewhat differently: “I quite honestly don’t understand why Steve had to write ‘Lucy and Jessie’ for Alexis [Smith] to replace the other number. I like ‘Uptown Downtown’ so much better. It also lost me a phrase to hang her dance on. I was originally able to differentiate the character’s two personalities by having half the phrase strutting up and the other half strutting down.”
⁸⁰

In a view that lies between these contrasting recollections, Prince commented tersely that “Uptown, Downtown” was “the right idea” but that “The Story of Lucy and Jessie” was “a better number.”
⁸¹
Jeffrey Lonoff’s notes to
A Collector’s Sondheim
offer a thoughtful comparison that places these disparate memories within a critical perspective: “In the show we see two Phyllises—the young, open, vibrant girl and the cool, distant woman she carefully molds herself into. Her song in the Loveland section was to reflect her schizoid personality. But ‘Uptown, Downtown’ presented Phyllis as a two-sided character whereas she was, as the show presented, really two separate people. It was dropped, and ‘The Story of Lucy and Jessie’ was written to better portray this.”

Although Sondheim credits the influence of Cole Porter on “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” a more likely model might be Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s “The Saga of Jenny” from
Lady in the Dark
. Resemblances between
the Sondheim and Weill songs go beyond their suggestively similar titles and subject matter—a woman responding to the accusation that she cannot make up her mind—and include such musical details as the nearly constant dotted rhythms and frequent descending minor triads, a predilection for flatted (blue) fifths, and a general jazz flavor.
⁸²

Earlier it was observed that the successful cast recording of
Pal Joey
led to a Broadway revival that surpassed its initial run. The abbreviated and what was generally perceived as an uncharacteristically poorly produced original 1971 cast album of
Follies
(albeit with a great cast) generated the need for a recording that was both more complete and more felicitously engineered. Unfortunately, in contrast to the pre-production
Pal Joey
recording that led to a full staged revival two years later, the new
Follies
album with its all-star cast issued in 1985 was not followed with a staged Broadway performance. Although a revised
Follies
made a successful appearance on the London stage two years later, it was not until a 1998 revival at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, that a staged version would return to the New York vicinity. A modestly staged production finally made it to Broadway for a short run in 2001.

James Goldman’s original libretto for
Follies
was not only critically controversial, it provoked strenuous debate between the two visionary co-directors, Bennett and Prince. What mainly bothered Bennett was the absence of humor and the general heaviness of tone—in short, its lack of commercial appeal. When Prince vetoed the idea of bringing in Neil Simon, a master of the one-liner, Bennett gave Goldman a joke book.
⁸³
Although he remained embittered by
Follies
’s disappointing box office returns, Bennett felt that his judgment of the book was vindicated by the show’s box office failure.
⁸⁴
Goldman agrees that the show might have had a long run, but that “at the same time we would have disemboweled it.”
⁸⁵
In retrospect, although Prince does not go as far as to say that he
likes
the book, he valued the book more highly than Bennett and clarifies that he did not “hate the book at all.”
⁸⁶
Sondheim thought the large number of pastiche numbers “hurt the book and subsequently hurt the show” and concluded that if they “had used fewer songs and had more book the show would have been more successful.”
⁸⁷

For the 1985 concert performance, Herbert Ross, hired to stage the show, asked Sondheim to change the ending: “I never liked the kind of hopelessness of the show’s finale…. I think you never really believed that the death of the theater was a sort of symbol for the death of these people’s lives. My view of it was that this was a celebration, and the original ending was too downbeat and not appropriate for this event.”
⁸⁸
Eventually Goldman himself had second thoughts about the ending of his 1971
Follies
: “The final scene of the show has always bothered me, I must admit. There were all
kinds of thoughts as to how we should have gone out at the end. I was pleased with the ending that Buddy and Sally had. I think it was honest and on target and about all you could do. I’m not so sure that if I had it to write over again that I would have had Ben and Phyllis together at the end.”
⁸⁹
Two years later Goldman
did
have it to write again when
Follies
was staged in London. This time, Goldman produced a new and even more upbeat book than the one implied in the 1985 concert performance.
⁹⁰

The principal deletions from the 1971
Follies
(see the online website) are Ben Stone’s philosophical “The Road You Didn’t Take” and, perhaps significantly, the two latest additions to the earlier version, Phyllis’s folly song, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” and Ben’s concluding folly song, “Live, Laugh, Love.”
⁹¹
Sondheim also created a new “Loveland” to replace the 1971 song of the same name to open the quartet of follies (one each for Benjamin and Phyllis Stone and Buddy and Sally Plummer) that brought the earlier show to its depressing close. Perhaps not surprisingly, the superficially successful Ben, who ultimately emerges as the most pathetic of the quartet in 1971, underwent the most surgery in 1987.

The first discarded song, Ben’s “The Road You Didn’t Take,” is replaced two songs later with “Country House,” a duet between Ben and Phyllis. This new song, although it conveys their poor communication and halfhearted attempts to work out their problems, demonstrates a civil and resigned incompatibility rather than their earlier bitterness and hostility. Phyllis’s new song, “Ah, but Underneath,” like “Being Alive” in
Company
, provides another illustration of a final attempt to capture a difficult dramatic situation. It also marks a return to Phyllis’s two-sided nature depicted in “Uptown, Downtown,” discarded earlier from the 1971
Follies
in favor of “Lucy and Jessie.”

Ben’s new folly song, like his new duet with Phyllis, constitutes the most radical change of tone between 1971 and 1987. Rather than breaking down as he did in “Live, Laugh, Love,” with newly acquired equanimity Ben tells his 1987 audiences not “to disclose yourself” but to “compose yourself” as he sings “Make the Most of Your Music.” Among the ironies of the song—and perhaps also its subtext—with its instructions to “Make the most of the music that is yours,” is Sondheim’s decision to begin Ben’s song with a quotation from the opening of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto set to words in the vocal line (in the orchestra alone the related opening of Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto directly follows).
⁹²
Ben initially considers himself “something big league” along with “Tchaikovsky and Grieg.” Soon, however, he advises his admirers that even if they are unable to produce a work like Debussy’s
Clair de Lune
, they can “make the most of the music that is yours” and eventually produce music that “soars.” Whatever Sondheim is saying about the
relative merits of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Debussy, Sondheim himself might be accused in this rare case of not practicing what his character preaches.

Although Sondheim’s new songs were expressly composed for this revival rather than for other shows, the results are not dissimilar. In fact, the 1987 London
Follies
, with its rewritten book and deleted, reordered, and new songs, is clearly analogous to Porter’s
Anything Goes
in its 1962 and 1987 reincarnations, and perhaps even more closely akin to the changes in
Show Boat
between 1927 and 1946. Just as the comic, even farcical, touches added to Bernstein’s 1974
Candide
(including Sondheim’s own new lyric for “Life Is Happiness Indeed”) no doubt contributed to its newfound success, perhaps at Voltaire’s expense, the more upbeat 1987
Follies
might eventually have found the audience it lost in 1971. But it did not. Despite its relative grimness, the original 1971
Follies
soon replaced the 1987 book.
⁹³

In his conversations with Mark Horowitz, Sondheim explains that he went along with Goldman’s and Cameron Mackintosh’s ideas about changing
Follies
for London, but like Goldman and eventually even Mackintosh, he voiced his strong preference for the earlier version: “It might have turned out better. It didn’t. And when it didn’t, I said: I don’t want this show ever shown in America, and I made it legally certain that the London version can never be shown here. I don’t want it shown again in England either, but Cameron has the right to do it. But Cameron’s given in now too, and there was just a production in Leicester last year, and it’s the original.”
⁹⁴
As George says in
Sunday in the Park with George
’s “Putting It Together,” “If no one gets to see it, it’s as good as dead.” This is a good description of the 1987 London
Follies
.

By the end of Sondheim’s
Company
, Robert, the bachelor protagonist, has learned that compromise is an essential feature of marriage. The ambiguity that three of Robert’s married male friends feel toward their wives and their marriages, expressed relatively early in the evening in “Sorry-Grateful,” culminates in Robert’s final readiness to share their fate, “Being Alive.” It is widely known that “Being Alive” was Sondheim’s fourth attempt at a final song for Robert.
⁹⁵
“Marry Me a Little,” which expressed Robert’s unwillingness to compromise, has found a secure place, albeit a new place, in the revised book of
Company
. The extraordinarily biting “Happily Ever After” described a marriage that ends “happily ever after in hell.” The marriage envisioned in “Being Alive” is far from perfect, but advocates of marriage can take heart that Robert has come to realize that “alone is alone,
not alive.” In his autobiography,
Contradictions
, Prince voiced his continued dissatisfaction with this final song, which he felt “imposed a happy ending on a play which should have remained ambiguous.” Otherwise, Prince concludes his chapter on
Company
by saying that this show “represents the first time I had worked without conscious compromise.” The producer in Prince was doubly pleased with its profit, however small, since “that is what commercial theatre must ask of itself.”
⁹⁶

Follies
, which explores the compromise of ideals in the lives of two unfulfilled married couples, lost most of its backers’ money because of its creators’ refusal to compromise and offer a lighter touch. The characters in Sondheim’s (and Prince’s) next musical,
A Little Night Music
, may need to discover their true feelings and are subjected to humiliation in the process, but at least they do not have to compromise them. The compromises were artistic ones and occurred offstage, at least according to Prince, who wrote in his memoirs sardonically that “mostly
Night Music
was about having a hit.”
⁹⁷

In
Pacific Overtures
(1976), generally perceived as a less compromising musical than
Night Music
, the formerly obedient feudal vassal Kayama forsakes ancient traditions in order to profit financially from his new Western trading partners. In act II, Kayama sports “A Bowler Hat” and a pocket watch, pours milk in his tea, and smokes American cigars. The eponymous anti-hero in
Sweeney Todd
(1979) and the infamous historical murderers and would-be murderers in
Assassins
(1991) relinquish their moral decency for the sake of revenge, notoriety, or other misguided ideals.
Into the Woods
(1987) concludes with abandoned, deceived, and disillusioned fairy-tale characters who have compromised their innocence but now understand that “No One Is Alone.” Some, such as Martin Gottfried, find the moralizing tone of
Into the Woods
platitudinous, yet a critic as rigorous as Stephen Banfield assesses this show as “Sondheim’s finest achievement yet.”
⁹⁸